U.K. first womb transplant

[VestaTilley]

The BBC has reported today that the first womb transplant has taken place in a hospital in England. A 40 year old woman donated her womb to her sister, hopefully enabling her to have children.

AIBU to be concerned about a potential dystopian future where women’s reproductive organs are harvested like car parts?

Journalists are treating this like it’s a positive, with few questions being asked about how the donor is recovering, how the foetus (if the recipient does conceive) will fare if the woman has to continue taking immuno suppressive drugs? Whether there is increased miscarriage risk?

Transplants are supposed to be life saving, not about wish fulfilment. Apparently 10 brain dead women are being lined up for future donation!

To me this all seems part of a bigger picture of surrogacy, synthetic embryo creation (reported earlier this year) and a drive to disassociate women from reproduction and the biology of our sex.

Am I alone in being bothered by this? I wish journalists would look more at the bigger societal picture.

Link here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-66514270

At what point have I referred to myself as a gender critical feminist? I said I'm massively gender critical - i am. I completely agree that gender is bollocks, I believe in sex based healthcare, sports and spaces. I believe also that if you, as a man, would like to fanny about in a dress and wig and call yourself Joan you are absolutely welcome to, just like I, as a woman am welcome to, too. I'll even call you by your woman's name and she/her if you want me to. I have absolutely no issues with you showing up in the world looking and feeling any way you like. I also expect to be treated with respect when I wear my hoodies and trainers, no makeup and rock my mostly bald head. My overies are pretty fucked too so I can grow a fairly impressive beard - that doesnt make me any less of a woman though, just like oestrogen and a skirt doesnt make anyone else more of one. You can even chop your cock off, you're still not a woman just like if I had my breasts chopped off and a penis sewn on, it wouldn't make me a man.

My belief is that your sex is immutable, but you can proclaim your gender as anything you like - it should never change your rights to access anything, because the world should be sex, not gender based. I am therefore highly critical of gender based arguments, or gender based ideology that's based on feeling and floaty concepts with no grounding in reality. I think laws should be written in stone based on concrete, undisutable facts and I don't think gender can ever be that - hence, gender critical. I don't identify myself in any way as 'anti-trans' because I'm not - I meet a lot of trans people through my work and I wouldn't say I'm 'anti' any of them. Even the ones with very different views to mine. They are entitled to those feelings, I just don't think we should be taking feelings into account when we're making laws that impact everyone. I also don't identify myself as a TERF because there's nothing radical in my views and I try my best to stay away from the more extreme edges of the trans debate, given that as with anything, the edges are where the extremists are. I think being an extremist on either side fo the debate damages the cause, both TRA's and TERFs I think harm their causes enormously.

I also don't think you telling another woman what she 'very clearly' thinks is particularly feminist...

At the time, if that family couldn't happen i wasn't interested in life childless. I'm not saying this way of thinking was healthy, far from it, but I wasn't in crisis and did not have any mental health issues to speak of, just a lack of interest in continuing to live.

This is sad to read and I feel for you and anyone else that feels like this as I have had some mental health issues too and its a huge thing to overcome. However, I am uneasy with the way you have stated it as if it is not a serious mental health issue, when it is. Its the most serious one because it would end the life of a person.

Yes I was illustrating how long it’s been going on for and that it has and will have been happening for some time. There have been some grim experiments done over the years in lots of countries. Even in humans.

I think they had to raise the money, it cost 25k.

It's just the way I saw my life at the time - suicide does make people uneasy, of course. I'm not trying to be flippant about it, as I say it was a very dark time in my life but I genuinely wasn't ill. I wasn't depressed in any clinical sense, just very sad. I sought help and I recieved coucilling and additional theropies but the conclusion was always the same for me - I saw no point in living a life if I couldn't be a parent. Again I'm not in any way saying that the way I felt was normal or healthy, just that it wasnt a sign of any kind of underlying mental health issue, other than 'shit life syndrome' in that there was an insurmountable thing in my life I couldn't fix and therefore had no desire to continue.

I'd also like to say that if anyone is reading this and feels the same way I did about their infertility - I was very, very wrong. I was told having a child in the conventional way would never happen for me but it did. I concieved my DS naturally after 19 years trying, he hung on in there and was born naturally a couple of days after my cerclage was removed. This moght not be the future for you but it might be and that's the bit I never had - hope.

I think you can absolutely empathize with individual women who grab the opportunity for fertility treatments, and those that take great risks and personal sacrifice to help other women. And at the same time it’s possible to question and even be critical of the moral and ethical ramifications of the same treatments.

Anyone who thinks their life is not worth living if they can't become pregnant is by definition mentally unwell.

Didn't the nazis get obsessed with fertility research at one point? I seem to remember reading at some point that Carl Clauberg swapped the womb of a woman who had successfully carried a child with the womb of a woman he had failed to artificially inseminate to see if that helped. It's chilling how much of our current understanding of female fertility or lack thereof was developed at the expense of Jewish victims. Therein lies another ethical question I think.

I wonder who the donors were

I don't think gender can ever be that - hence, gender critical

You know what people on Mumsnet generally mean when they say "gender critical". There are plenty of women who aren't that fussed about trans rights either way. But calling yourself "gender critical" to give yourself spurious authority in the trans question is disingenuous when you criticise other women in the thread for bringing up perfectly relevant points in terms that TRAs use (what the fuck does "obsessed with their own biology" even mean?) , and call them the "anti trans brigade" and approve of them being called "terfs", a misogynistic slur.

So no. Not buying it.

I don’t believe any of this research or ground breaking surgery is anything to do with the advancement of female reproduction and health. Why not research PCOS or endometriosis more, why not investigate the root causes of infertility more, why not research how we can reduce birth injuries more, why not research why women of colour are more likely to suffer miscarriage. Why have we jumped straight to womb transplants? Is investigating infertility just not cutting edge enough? I guarantee that sort of research would benefit more women. I believe this is about money, egos and prestige (and I am being generous), and certainly not about the benefit to women as a whole. This is major surgery, and that’s putting it lightly. My cousin had a lung transplant (CF), she survived for 10 years - that was considered a success. Why are we going down the route of such major intervention when the other preceding stuff hasn’t yet been understood or researched properly? I don’t believe the main goal of this is to help women.

Ahh that's where you're wrong. Culturally, that's the attitude in the UK for sure, no disputing it. But the clinicalisation of wanting to die isn't an international norm, far from it. You wouldnt argue that anyone with a degenerative or terminal illness wanting to end their life before nature did it for them was mentally unwell and to me, this was infertility. Infertility was stopping me from living the only life I saw as being of value to me, it was a confirmation that the rest of my life was not worth living and therefore, my conclusion was to end it rather than suffer the pain of it for the next 50 years. That seemed like a fate worse than death for me.

You'll notice I say 'for me' a lot and that's because my lived experience of infertility was, I absolutely understand, at the extreme. Most women are able to find value in their life beyond being a parent, or find other ways to be a parent. I couldn't. That may well be a sign that my life was not great at that point and I'd agree with that, I wasn't mentally unwell in any clinical sense though - I was perfectly healthy, I jsut had a shit life.

I think you can absolutely empathize with individual women who grab the opportunity for fertility treatments, and those that take great risks and personal sacrifice to help other women. And at the same time it’s possible to question and even be critical of the moral and ethical ramifications of the same treatments.

This.

Brillaintly put.

What would you call my views, as I've explained them, if not gender critical?

Reality-based. As most people are. Not a believer in a bizarre ideology where people tell men they might have wombs if they want them.

"Gender critical" is a label associated with people who campaign against gender identity ideology. "Terfs" to trans rights activists. As you would be.

Longtomp

@MrsSkylerWhite the article said it was privately funded and the surgeons all gave their time for free. No nhs money was used.”

That time and the NHS (which pays their salaries) facilities could have been used to carry out 10+ potentially life saving surgeries.

Post pandemic, needs must take priority over wants.

I agree with this and it's where I'm landing I think. Thinking back to my time dealing with infertility before I really questioned much around womens reproductive rights, if you had told me a womb transplant would have cured me, and I could have had a child I'd have bitten your hand off immediately and twice on Sundays. I'd like to think now I'd feel differently, but I say that as a mother now from a massive position of privilage in that I've had my child. I can't say even now im better informed, I wouldnt make the same choice if I was still struggling.

"Gender critical" is a label associated with people who campaign against gender identity ideology.

Further to this - "campaign against the overreach of gender identity ideology" would be more accurate. If people admitted that they were the sex they were, and males left women's stuff alone, and both sexes didn't try to change the language women need to fight for ourselves, I imagine most people would coexist fine with people who believe in gender identity ideology.

I agree with this and it's where I'm landing I think. Thinking back to my time dealing with infertility before I really questioned much around womens reproductive rights, if you had told me a womb transplant would have cured me, and I could have had a child I'd have bitten your hand off immediately and twice on Sundays. I'd like to think now I'd feel differently, but I say that as a mother now from a massive position of privilage in that I've had my child. I can't say even now im better informed, I wouldnt make the same choice if I was still struggling.

That's understandable.

I have no doubt a TRA would call my views terfy in fact I know they do I have no issue with that though, I have also been called a TRA for the exact same views by a self proclaimed TERF because I'm happy to use the pronouns someone asks me to use for them. As i said, extremism on either side of the argument is a bit bonkers to me.

Happy for you to refer to me as a realist or anything else you like really as long as it accurately represents my views, I'll continue to describe my views as gender critical because that's what they are - critical of gender identity ideology.

The surgeon who operated on Einar went on to conduct appalling, torturous experiments on people at one of the concentration camps.

https://twitter.com/TwisterFilm/status/1408150587175227396

I think this is something we can all agree with.

Absolutely.

FWIW re organ transplants, I removed my name when they reversed the consent from opt-in to opt-out. I find that coercive, and morally reprehensible.